I'm not really with y'all on the alcohol fix. I find alcohol doesn't help much, what help it gives is too brief and the ratio of feeling good to feeling bad isn't equitable. Hence I drink less now than I have in years. Intense exercise helps. Music helps. Welding helps. Getting my hopes up that the next person to come along will bring surprise instead of disappointment... indulging in fanciful daydreams... these help, but then there's always the crash.

Yes! The only cure for such malaise is the drink! None of us will ever be permanently content. Happiness, purpose, love, belonging... are the cool breeze on a warm spring day; it wraps around you for a second then drifts away, leaving you temporarily satisfied..... but then you want it to return, and you can't make it, you just have to wait. And waiting is boring isn't it? Do you know what cures boredom? Alcohol!!!!! Yes children, alcohol fills all the voids that life simply canít provide you all the time. Methinks another glass is in order.

No Vera, have hope! The 20's are exceptionally bad, especially for women. My friend who is 50 tells me things get better then. I am a long way from 50 though...

Anyway, this film Sade was quite good. Actually explored his philosphy while avoiding the usual over-the-top sensationalism of fornicating with nuns and the torture of whores. I sympathized with the doomed aristocrats, so helpless in their bored degeneracy. No absinthe scenes, but I highly recommend it.

Today was a glorious sunny day in NYC. So naturally I spent it in the dark movie theatre watching "Sade" the new film about our old friend the Marquis de Sade. During the French Revolution a bunch of aristocrats are being held political prisioners at a convent awaiting the guillotine. A kind of poor man's spa but, a glorious death row. One of the main characters, a teenage girl, says "I am about to die and I have not yet lived." How many of us feel this way at 30, 40, 50 or older....? Does this malaise, this anxiety, ever really go away?

I know what you mean, Rabid. It sounds like I have relatively less to complain about 'externally', yet I have been at least as whiny lately. I tend to blame it on a lack of the right kind of social relationships/connection, something that has made a tremendous, though temporary, difference in the past. However, I think the real root is different. It's the curse of relative prosperity. The inverse of the Chinese maxim 'May you live in interesting times'. The lack of urgency, danger, dire circumstances, clear purpose... I didn't feel like this when, on the way down to Florida, the ball hitch popped off my truck on an interstate mousetrap and I was dragging my trailer by a flimsy chain in a shower of sparks. I don't remember feeling like this when I was driving an ex-girlfriend to the hospital in the middle of the night....

"And, as a main character, I feel that the authors have done a poor job in evoking sympathy on the part of the reader."

Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story's too damn real and in the present tense? Or that everybody's on the stage, and it seems like you're the only person sitting in the audience? Skating away, skating away, skating away on the thin ice of the New Day.

It's not that my life is, externally at least, so bad. Taken from the point of view of a refugee or a cancer victim, a snapshot of my days and nights reveals this:

I get up late in the afternoon, shower (or not) and go to work.

On the way, I have a cigarette for breakfast, to be followed by coffee for lunch.

This snapshot is taken with a grainy Polaroid.

Somehow, I'm still chubby. I am well liked, respected, even (though modesty may cringe to hear me say it) admired by my peers, my employees and cohorts from around the world. I'm good at what I do, and I care. It's a frustrating grind sometimes, but the coffee's free, and there is the net to surf and of course the more than adequate paycheck. Plus, I'm on this plan through my credit union where every paycheck I get to buy back 2% of my soul.

I come home, in eight or ten or twelve hours. I read a book, or take a walk, or play the aformentioned Sony Time Remover 2. I think about writing a story, maybe, but I have no computer, and longhand is just too... long.

I make big plans, and follow through on one in ten.

I hang out with my friends on my days off. We have great conversation, a good time, a beer or a walk in Gettysburg or a game of D&D or shit, whatever.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

From the outside, to say, a starving man or to someone in prison, this is a very sweet deal.

More than enough money to live on, three squares, people who care about me. Time and the power to count the angels that dance on my pinheads.

I long to give that starving man this albatross of an existence. I would smile at him, feel a twinge of guilt (crushed out quickly and finally like a smoked out cigarette) and hang it round his neck.

Then I would run like hell, far far away where he could never catch me.

Really- I'm a whiner, a pathetic little bitch. Right now if he could, Mister Starving in Prison Refugee with Cancer guy would probably make me eat this fucking keyboard.

Well, fuck him. He can't. And anyway, this is my story- him, you can no doubt catch in Reader's Digest under the 'Humor Behind Bars With Cancer and No Homeland and No Goddamn Food' section.

It's right after that part about how you shouldn't use that one brand of dishsoap because it causes irritable bowel syndrome and you end up with Lemony Fresh turds running down your pants.

I suppose you're wondering why, just who it is that pissed in my cornflakes. And I suppose I'm going to tell you, just any minute now.

Walking home from my car, it's after work. Late, empty and beautiful, not a soul on the road, just me and that moon so bright and full and high in the clouds.

She is serene and intense, Luna Psychotica, a Fury-goddess on X and PCP all my own.

I wonder on my way to my empty room (decorated but not for me, I live alone) if maybe it's true- maybe I could be a werewolf or a vampire or I don't know, just something else to get me the hell out of here. Better to be hunted by the CIA cause I'm an alien than see my empty room staring back at me.

But I don't know, I mean I already am a something else, I'm a magician, I walk in dreams and talk to cats. I can almost (soon maybe)almost pass through walls.

The crackerjack prize of enlightenment.

And it's just as cool as being any other something else. Probably cooler, really. When you think about it- I could be the Creature from the Black Lagoon but that would probably turn out to suck in just a few minutes.

It's just me alone in my room, reading the Sagas and Hirohito or maybe a new comic book or playing that fucking Playstation.

Wasting my hours and waiting for something, something to just happen, for chrissakes.

But knowing all the while it's happening right now, right in front of my expresionless face. The wonder of the world, this masterwork of the gods leaves me cold, maybe hoping the sequel won't wander as much in terms of plot and story.

And, as a main character, I feel that the authors have done a poor job in evoking sympathy on the part of the reader.